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Sushi Recipes: Making Dashi Stock – Japanese Sea Stock

My third blog in the sushi recipes series, this one’s on how to make dashi stock. Dashi stock is a super versatile Japanese Sea Stock used for a variety of purposes. You can blanch vegetables (broccoli, spinach, shiitake mushrooms, etc.) with it for a nice warm bowl of Udon noodles or mix it in with eggs to make Tamago (more on this later). The cool thing about dashi stock is that you can easily make it a vegan recipe without losing much of the flavor.

Making Dashi Stock

The Sushi Cookbook calls the dashi stock as premier stock and mentions that it’s the base stock for many of the recipes in the book. But at it’s heart, dashi stock is simply water with kombu or dried kelp. Once the base is made, you can either add shiitake mushrooms to make this vegan or bonito flakes to make it authentic. Either way the whole deal takes just a few minutes with a pot of boiling water.

The first part of making dashi stock, vegan or not, is the same. Place 6-inch strip dried kelp, cut into 3 pieces into a pan with 4 cups of water. Remove the kelp as soon as the water boils. If you are up for it, the cooked kelp makes a tasty snack. Add in the bonito flakes to the stock, don’t stir and remove the pan from the water. Wait until the bonito flakes sink, strain the stock through a fine-mesh strainer and your dashi stock is ready. For the vegan version, add in 4 to 6 medium sized shiitake mushroom after you’ve removed the kelp and cook until the mushrooms are soft.